Hanging In There

Report Date: July 11, 2011

Things have been a little bit quiet since my last report. I have been fishing but just not as much as I am used to. We did a few dolphin trips in the Gulfstream and the dolphin fishing this year has been very poor especially for bigger fish. Most of the local dolphin tournaments have been won with fish in the 20 to 30 pound range where it usually takes a 40 to 50 pound fish to win. The good news is that even if the dolphin fishing has been slow, we have been coming in to the edge in the afternoons and finding plenty of action there. The bonitas have been thick and there have been some kingfish and some sailfish as well.

We also did one combo day/night swordfish trip. We did catch a swordfish during the day, but didn’t get any bites at night. We were not on a great moon phase and I did hear of a few fish being caught at night during the better phases of the moon. I have a couple of daytime sword trips booked this month and will hopefully get some night trips as well.

Probably the best bet this time of year is a trip to the Bahamas. I just got back from a trip over there and had another one about a week or so ago. Summertime in Bimini means one thing and that is big flag yellowtails. This past trip I decided to run south to some of my older hunting grounds and target the bottomfish. It’s been a while since I fished to the south and was hoping it was still good. One of the reasons I chose to go down there was that there is usually plenty of other fish to fish for besides yellowtails. Most of the time you can catch some big AJ’s, cero mackerel of record size, horse eye jacks, kingfish, groupers, etc. We didn’t get a whole lot of fish, but we did catch some yellowtails as well way too many huge blue runners and chubs. The next day I didn’t mess around and headed straight to the Gingerbreads which have been phenomenal this whole year. The Gingerbreads did not fail once again and we had stellar snapper fishing and caught fish pretty much non stop.
Another option to target in the Bahamas is to go to NW Channel and look for the schools of yellowfin tunas. That is a trip that you need decent weather and must plan ahead of time, just so you can have the right bait on board. I didn’t get any reports of yellowfin from this past weekend, but I know of a few boats that got them during the 4th of July weekend.

If you haven’t caught a swordfish before or want to catch another one, or if you would like to schedule a trip to the Bahamas, now is the time to call and set it up while we still have a few months left in the summer.

Also as preview, I have a new 34 ft SeaVee coming and this one is going to have a full tower, so sailfish and cobias and mahis, watch out! I’ll have more news on the new boat in the next few reports.

Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos

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